Why Diets Work
Why diets work, whether it be a fad diet, or a medical diet, has always been intriguing to me as a long time personal trainer in Austin. As I’ve said many times in my blogs and in various essays both here on the site, as well as in various publications, there are no shortage of fad diets and trends with which you will supposedly achieve an amazing physique. Usually I scoff at these things because they are doing nothing revolutionary other than the latest marketing trends or gimmicks.
When you think about it, there are only 3 macronutrients. Fats, proteins, and carbohydrates. All these diet’s seemingly do is shift the amounts of one or more of these macronutrients and presto, amazing supermodel you in 2 weeks! Guess what? They don’t work on most people, and for a variety of reasons. Oftentimes, it’s because those diets are based on junk science, at best. Other times, it’s because people don’t stick with it, but rather buy all of the associated products instead with the greatest of hopes and intentions, only to have wasted their time and a lot of money. In the rare cases of success, the obvious question to answer is why diets work.
In the case of a carbohydrate deficient diet, the answer is rather obvious. You will simply lose a lot of water weight since the ingestion of one gram of carbohydrates leads the body to hold an average of 2.2 grams of water as a result of the digestive process wherein the kidneys secrete sodium. The math is simple. More sodium equals greater water retention. If you want to do a subtraction equation, just flip it and in this case, that’s why diets work. You simply lose water weight. When you stop to consider that the human body is comprised of an average of 65% water in composition, it should come as no surprise to anyone that when you deplete water, you have obviously depleted weight. That’s fine for what it is, but that is not body fat that you’ve lost. It’s simply water.
The new craze these days is the Keto diet. It’s simply a combination of several methodologies, and a lot of people have made a lot of money selling products and nutrition plans employing this trend. I’m not overly impressed by it professionally, but like any diet, there have been a fair number of people who swear by it as opposed to swearing at it, because they have quantifiable results. So then why would that be?
I was having a conversation with a personal training client of mine the other morning whose wife has been on the Keto diet for a while, and has lost a few pounds here and there. When he asked me how that’s possible, I explained that virtually any diet can be successful to those who truly practice it consistently. It’s because they have become accountable to themselves, watch exactly what they put in their body, and don’t deviate back to what got them overweight in the first place. When you consider this for a moment, one can quickly infer that if they set aside the trend or the fad of the moment, and ate the proper amount of food, at the proper times, with the proper balance of macronutrients, and of course, stayed adequately hydrated, they would lose weight. The kicker is, that anybody can achieve their physical goals with this approach, so long as they are not trying to defy their genetics. The aforementioned client, whose wife is using the Keto diet in an effort to lose weight, has been insisting that he, who has different physical goals, as well as genetics than her, join her on this diet so that she can be more consistent with it. That’s great to have camaraderie from your spouse, but like I’ve mentioned many times, there is no one size fits all diet. Just as there is no one size fits all workout plan that many so called personal trainers hand out to their clients in bulk, thus turning the term personal trainer into an oxymoron.
If you surely want to be successful with weight loss, athletic pursuits, muscle gains, etc, you must do it on a personal level and have everything tuned to your body. If you embrace a sweeping statement fad type diet, or workout, you will likely see some results if you stick with it, but that’s not how you maximize your true genetic potential, whether that be great or small. That’s why diets work even better when they’re customized for the individual.
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Andy
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